Woodblock

Share

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Right-wing Japanese lawmakers and activists have
successfully rounded up more than 25,000 signatures for a petition on the White
House website asking the Obama administration to force the state of New Jersey
to take down a monument dedicated to the memory of "comfort women," the
thousands of women kidnapped and raped by Japanese soldiers during World War
II.

The Bergen County executive dedicated
a small monument in Palisades Park, New Jersey, in late 2010 that included
the following inscription:

IN MEMORY OF
THE MORE THAN 200,000 WOMEN AND GIRLS WHO WERE ABDUCTED BY THE ARMED FORCES OF
THE GOVERNMENT OF IMPERIAL JAPAN. 1930's - 1945
KNOWN AS
"COMFORT WOMEN," THEY ENDURED HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS THAT NO PEOPLES SHOULD
LEAVE UNRECOGNIZED. LET US NEVER FORGET THE HORRORS OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

Ever since then, officials in the Japanese
governmentand and elements of Japanese society that dispute the above facts related
to the comfort women have been trying to get the monument, which is located in
an area with a large Korean population, taken down.

Two delegations of Japanese officials visited
Palisades Park last month to ask local leaders to
remove the monument. One of the delegations was led by the Japanese
consul-general in New York, Shigeyuki
Hiroki. Local officials in New Jersey refused to remove the monument, even when
offered cherry trees and other goodies from the Japanese government.

Now, the Japanese comfort-women deniers have a new
tactic -- to go straight to the White House. They started
a petition on the White House's official website and have
conducted a successful campaign resulting in over 28,000 signatures.

"We petition the Obama administration to: Remove the monument and not to support any
international harassment related to this issue against the people of Japan,"
the petition reads. "False
accusations regarding the South Korean comfort women issue have disgraced the people
of Japan for decades. Over the past few years it has come to light that many of
the original charges were false or completely fabricated."

"Yet despite this new information,
the United States continues to lend credence to the original false charges by
memorializing the comfort women in a monument in New Jersey and a street name
in New York. Not only is this perpetrating historical untruths, but it also
leads unnecessary racial conflict and suffering of people of Japanese
ancestry," the petition reads. "We strongly request President Obama to remove
the monument and not to support any international harassment related to this
issue against the people of Japan."

According to the White House website,
the administration must give an official response to any petition that receives
25,000 signatures within 30 days of when it was originally posted. The
Japanese comfort women petition crossed that threshold more than a week ahead
of its June 9 deadline.
The massive amount of signatures
came mostly from Japan and due to the direct advocacy of several Japanese
lawmakers and former officials. A Japanese resident in the United States, by
the name of Yasuko R, created the
petition. A supporter can sign for the petition once a day.

The petition was advertised in Japan
on the websites of Japanese lawmakers Eriko
Yamatani and Keiji Furuya, who were part of
one of the delegations that visited New Jersey, which included family members
of some of the 13 Japanese citizens that were abducted by North Korea in the
1970s and 1980s.

Nippon Kaigi, a right-wing Japanese
organization, supported the petition's call to remove the monument, as did
other organizations, including Nippon Kaigi Local Government (Pride of Japan), and The Spirit of Japan Party
(Nihon Soshin To), which posted directions on how Japanese citizens could
participate in the petition.

Major
advocacy for the petition came from Toshio Tamogami, the former
Japanese Air Force chief of staff who was fired in 2009 after
creating an international incident by writing in an essay that Japan was
"not an aggressor nation" in World War II. Tamogami not only called for petition signatures on his website,
he gave instructions
in Japanese for users to log onto the White House website so they could be part
of the effort.

The comfort women issue and Japan's
reluctance to come to terms with its wartime actions is still the No. 1 irritant
in Japan's relations with its neighbors. For U.S.-based experts that are
critical of Japan's handling of the issue, the petition and its underlying
argument are doing great damage to Japan's ability to move past the events of
the war.

"Is the Japanese right so strung
out, so unpopular that it is reduced to these silly international stunts to get
attention? Have they become so irrelevant that they have to prop up Comfort
Women and Abductees of the North Koreans for attention? They have become as
pathetic as their ideas," said Mindy
Kotler, the founder of Asia Policy Point,
a non-profit organization that does research on Japan.

She said one part of the problem is
the failure of the U.S. government to connect its human rights and women's
rights policies to Japan.

"We have built and demanded to build
institutions around the world to address war crimes and human rights. In regard
to historical war crimes, we have a bureau in the State Department on the
Holocaust* and even appointed an ambassador in the late 1990s to deal with
German and Austrian war crimes," she said. "But we have done nothing that
addresses the lingering, if not festering problems of Japan's reluctantly
acknowledged war crimes. It eats away at our alliances and undermines our ‘shared
values.'"

The White House petition response
should be posted "in a timely manner," according to the website.

The Office seeks to bring a measure of justice and assistance to
Holocaust victims and their families and to create an infrastructure to
assure that the Holocaust is remembered properly and accurately. This is
an important issue in our bilateral relations with countries of central
and eastern Europe and with the state of Israel.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Us

APP is a Washington research center studying the U.S. policy relationship with Northeast Asia. We provide factual context and informed insight on Asian science, finance, politics, security, history, and public policy.